Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!
-2 Corinthians 5:17 (NIV)
If the old is gone and the new is here, why are so many believers struggling with thoughts and behaviors that don’t look like their new nature?
Why are so many struggling to get to a place of freedom and confidence through their new identities in Christ?
I’m sure you have your reasoning to answer those questions, but are they valid in accordance with the Word of God?
Probably not.
The truth is, many of my brothers and sisters are relying on human reasoning and feelings with a newfound intellect through the self-awareness movement, and it’s becoming widely accepted by the church.
The simple and foundational concept of renewing our mind has been tossed out the window and replaced with understanding ourselves better to explain why we think, feel, and do what we do, no longer responding to the call to live transformed.
This self-awareness movement that has been accepted into the church is keeping us in tension between our old self and our new nature in Christ. Putting the emphasis on awareness of our “why” and “self” improvement.
We are not supposed to be improving our human nature and flesh.
We are supposed to take it off and put on Christ.
Many of us are trying to get to a place of confidence, unsure how to walk out who we are by design as new creations in Christ, rooted in our already established worth.
Our culture tells us that we need to develop “self” confidence.
Let me explain how this idea has created confusion—our human tendency is to compartmentalize our faith in one box, our duty as a believer in another, and then way over in another box is this idea that we must develop self-confidence. Culture’s way of cultivating self-confidence is through our own evaluations, our hard work, our successes, and our personal self-talk. We engage with those components, allowing our work and our accomplishments to define us, placing our value system through our human understanding. If we are honest with what we think about ourselves, we find our self-esteem is determined by how good of a day we had, what we’ve accomplished, our successes, and/or by what other people think of us. This idea is putting us in conflict with a constant internal feeling of “not enough,” leading us to try and perform even better (or give up altogether). Our self-confidence is limited to how much we feel we’ve accomplished based on our personal evaluations, leaning on our own understanding.
This cycle reveals that our confidence has been formed through human perception, not grasping that God’s value system doesn’t work that way.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding.
— Proverbs 3:5 (NLT)
We are directed through the Word of God not to lean on our own understanding, for very good reason, and to trust God with all of our hearts.
Our thoughts, feelings, and evaluations of ourselves cannot be trusted. They waver and fluctuate too often and are not built around a Kingdom perspective. Rather than taking God’s Word seriously and going straight to the Bible to understand how valuable we are to Him, we’ve mixed the two, adopting a worldview in with God’s view, which has created continual insecurity through the body of Christ.
Our worth is found through our Maker and what He says about us.
Mixing a worldview (humanistic perspective) with God’s view has led us to a constant inner struggle in our personal walks with Jesus.
Let me put this into simple terms . . . if you identify yourself as a Christian, then your identity and value are found in Christ.
That’s it.
The word Christian means “to be like Christ.”
When you come into a relationship with Jesus, you are to strip yourself of all your old ways and allow the Holy Spirit to mold and shape you to become more like Him. He is the Potter, and we are the clay. If we haven’t fully surrendered every part of ourselves to God, we will continue to be molded and shaped by something, whether it be our upbringing, our situations, others’ opinions, our experiences in life, our feelings, even our successes or failures. If it’s not God, then it will be something else that will shape us into who we are today.
Many of us have been shaped by life, not by God.
We’ve formed our value through an ungodly perspective.
I know that sounds harsh, but seriously, anything outside of God‘s value system is ungodly.
Let’s start calling things what they are so we can put each idea and thought into its proper place. When we confront things in full honesty, without sugarcoating or minimizing, we naturally have a stronger desire to acknowledge and uproot anything that opposes what God says to be true.
His Truth is the only Truth that truly sets us free.
If we are paying attention to our thought-life, we usually have an excuse to undermine what God says about us because of how we feel about ourselves.
Check in with your thought-life regularly and invite the Holy Spirit to reveal to you what you really think and believe.
Our thoughts determine our true belief system. When we are looking at ourselves through our own belief system, what we find is a flawed individual with strengths and weaknesses.
Self-awareness causes us to want to fix our flaws in our own strength, or cover up what we don’t like, projecting an image of what we feel will make us look good to others, putting our “best self” forward.
Not always, but often.
Some just feel completely unworthy and wear “garments” that match how they feel. Bottom line, self-awareness causes our focus to be on what we think and believe about ourselves (which wavers), not who God says we are (His unwavering Truth).
Then, when we read what the Bible says about us, we feel a push and pull in our thought-life because our thoughts, feelings, and emotions have been given too much power, making it humanly impossible to see ourselves the way God sees us. We have become too self-focused, not looking to God to see ourselves through His heart, struggling to believe Him at His Word.
When we are struggling to recognize these Truths, or the inability to receive what God says, we resort to self talk which is not always beneficial. Self-talk usually puts the emphasis on our human understanding based on feelings.
And for many, self-talk is spent beating ourselves down in our head (or trying to build ourselves up) instead of allowing the Word of God to build us up according to what He says. This creates a constant frustration in our minds and hearts because we do not feel the way God does about us. Trying to change our own mind is not only mentally draining, but as soon as we fall short in any given area, we go back to our default belief system (human understanding) and feel this pressure to measure up in order to feel good enough. This can easily lead us to depression and discouragement.
I want to introduce a powerful difference between self-talk and God-talk.
Self-talk can change based on our circumstances and the feelings that arise. God-talk is through the power of the Holy Spirit, built on His unwavering Word that will not change, even when circumstances, thoughts, feelings, and emotions do. This is why we must build from God’s unchanging Truth, not our own version of the truth (human understanding).
God-talk makes the decision that what He says about us is the only thing that carries value, placing the emphasis on His thoughts about us; our attention is on Him and off of ourselves.
God’s Word must carry a higher value to us over all humanistic thoughts, feelings, and emotions.
From there, we get to invite the power of the Holy Spirit to come and help us rewire our thinking until it lines up with His value system. In order to do this, we have got to get “self” out of the way, so we can clearly see who we are through our Maker’s eyes.
This is where being rooted in God’s love becomes vital. We need to know the love of God that helps us recognize the high price that was paid for us, and that we are seen through the blood of Jesus.
His righteousness.
We are the righteousness of Christ.
We cannot earn our way to this place of confidence.
It’s already been secured through Him.
I have a very practical and simple rule for myself. I call thoughts and words that create a dialogue in my mind that conflicts with God’s heart and Truth “toilet talk.” If it doesn’t line up with Him, it gets flushed.
My belief system is shaped through God’s Word, not through my feelings. From there, my perspective line up with the Kingdom of Heaven. I’ve had to train myself to willingly and consciously choose to remove ungodly ideas and thoughts from my mind and mouth!
Period.
Realize, we all have the choice in what we tell ourselves.
Let’s recognize where we’ve put the emphasis on self-awareness and move back to becoming more aware of what Jesus paid for, taking every wrong thought captive, and replacing it with what God says until we are fully living out our new natures — to be like Christ.
